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by raptortech 1661 days ago
The demo here is underwhelming compared to old-school winamp visualizers.

But I think that with deep learning, there is now a real opportunity to make a kickass visualizer. Take a GAN and set the latent vector according to the DFT of the audio stream -- it would be super trippy. You could even use WaveNet and CLIP to make the visuals match the lyrics.

3 comments

Yeah, I can understand that.

I had a lot of fun listening to music in winamp when I was younger with milkdrop. But I think my tastes have changed now to where I prefer visualizations with more concrete imagery and variety instead of the usual variations of abstract effects (they are still dope as hell though).

I tried to design this app with that in mind, but I definitely see why some people don't find them this style of visualization to be interesting. Maybe someday someone will put some serious effort into bringing the demoscene-style visualizations into the modern era?

Demoscene style: https://github.com/XT95/VisualLiveSystem (of course the demosceners got you covered)
The winamp ones were done by genius demosceners
Yeah to this day I think of Winamp visualizers as still the best implementation of music visualization ecosystem to date. iTunes had (has?) visualization plugins but didn’t compare to the hey day of Winamp. Seems like people just stopped trying in this category? Not sure where the audio visualization scene is at
I remember back in the winamp days thinking "this is awesome, I can't wait to see how much more awesome this is in 15 years!".

Alas progression in tech can't be taken for granted.

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I built out a mini Spotify player with visualization support: https://github.com/dvx/lofi

Even had a few folks contribute a couple of neat visualizations[1] :)

PS: Visualizations were unfortunately deprecated on Macs since like 1.5.0 because of the incredible difficulty of getting the audio stream data. Pretty sure there's no way of doing it these days outside of a kext.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/lofi/tree/master/src/visualizations

Actually the new Music.app will load visualization plugins on SIP disabled systems from a specific folder and specific format, although it's been far too long now for me to remember where that folder was. I'm sure some keen reversers can take a look at Music.app and figure it out again. I for one absolutely love the iTunes visualizers, they even have hidden key commands to manipulate them with.
What resources have you found on algorithmic music visualization?
Metagroove is a pretty great visualizer that has the same vibe as Winamp's, but with a modern touch -- and more importantly, a modern resolution.

https://marumari.itch.io/metagroove

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/jqda6f...